The present invention relates to a system for electronically composing document formats consisting of visually perceivable marks of printed data, bar code or hard copy and applying those marks to a record medium which is intended to be human and machine readable.
An example of an application of this invention lies in the automatic printing of documents such as tags and labels of the type employed in retail applications. Such tags and labels constitute identification documents which are attached to goods.
The present invention has the capability of accepting information and composing instructions from a number of success including: keyboard, card reader, punched cards, magnetic tape, computer or mini-computer. The composing instructions processed by a memory permit the composing of the information in a desired format to be printed on such documents. Since such composition is performed automatically it is possible to generate as many or as few documents containing identical information as may be required followed by a rapid changeover to a series of documents or even a single document containing new information printed thereon.
The system further includes the capability of printing not only characters selected from conventional human readable type faces but also may print various forms of indicia including optical character recognition type characters (OCR), bar codes, etc., selected from fonts of such characters.
The necessity for more rapid and more accurate processing of identification documents has stimulated the industry to look for solutions by which such identification documents may be read by machine. One solution has been the printing of information in a code on such identification documents which may be read by a suitable optical reader. Such coded information on individual tags and labels would permit the machine reading of those documents by the use of, for example, a hand-wandable light pen at the point of sale. In addition, large numbers of such identification documents may be read by means of an optical batch reader at periodic intervals.
One such code which has been proposed by the National Retail Merchants Association as a standard has been designated as the OCR-A format. Such proposals and standards and specifications for such documents and OCR characters are set forth in the publication "Voluntary Retail Identification Standard Specification - A-1974" dated Sept. 12, 1974 and issued by the National Retail Merchants Association of New York, New York. The foregoing publication is, in part, based upon the publication "American National Standard Character Set and Print Quality for Optical Character Recognition, (OCR-A), X3.17-1974" issued in 1974 by the American National Standards Institute of New York, New York. Both the foregoing publications are hereby incorporated by reference into the disclosure of the present patent application. However, the present system is adaptable to using formats of any other type as, for instance, bar codes in conformance with the standard known as the Universal Product Code (UPC).
Thus, the present system has the capability of printing human readable characters, OCR codes and bar codes in whatever combination desired for a particular application.